On Failure

I was going to write 50,000 words during April for Camp NaNoWriMo. I was going to finish my current WIP ahead of LDStorymakers, now less than 2 weeks away. I was going to work more at my freelance writing job. I was going to exercise daily and eat fewer calories. I was going to do a lot of things.

Instead... I didn't. I wrote NO fiction. I increased my freelance hours by a mere fraction of what was possible. I gained weight - and it's not muscle.

Part of my failure is because I had to shift priorities, part of it is because of my continuing addiction to social media (curse my interesting friends saying interesting things!), and part of it is because, well, I got bored with my WIP's plot, and didn't much care what happened next.

I have great excuses, like being a mother, having a traveling husband, trying to jump-start a new career in mediation, and all sorts of other stuff....

But I wrote more words on Facebook last month than I did in my WIP.

I ate third helpings at dinner even when I was full. And then ate a full helping of dessert. I didn't exercise as often or as hard as I could have, preferring to hurry up to my office to web-surf.

But here's the thing about failure: I don't HAVE to do it today, just because I did it yesterday. Just because I spent the last hour on pointless surfing, I don't have to spend the next three hours on the same thing. My day might be shorter, now, than it should be, but I can still accomplish more than nothing. More than I accomplished Thursday and Friday last week.

Besides, I've finally figured out why I was bored and, though I'll have to rewrite about 5 chapters, my book will be better.

Now if I can ignore that shiny blue F.... Hey! Did you know it's possible to CLOSE the Facebook tag on your browser? So weird.

How do you overcome your own failures?